Image by Damien Donck

When it comes to politics, science, and social issues (e.g., the U.S. Constitution, evolution, and healthcare reform), it’s impossible to argue with people that blatantly espouse contradictions, maintain hypocritical double standards, and are content to wallow in their own willful ignorance. First, consider the issues of constitutional rights, poverty, race, and the views maintained by some Republicans and the Tea Party via the New York Times:

In the Tea Party’s talk of states’ rights, critics say they hear an echo of slavery, Jim Crow and George Wallace. Tea Party activists call that ridiculous: they do not want to take the country back to the discrimination of the past, they say, they just want the states to be able to block the federal mandate on health insurance.

Still, the government programs that many Tea Party supporters call unconstitutional are the ones that have helped many black people emerge from poverty and discrimination. It is not just that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for Senate in Kentucky, said that he disagreed on principle with the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that required business owners to serve blacks. It is that many Tea Party activists believe that laws establishing a minimum wage or the federal safety net are an improper expansion of federal power.

Critics rightly note that Dr. King spoke over and over of the need for this country to acknowledge its “debt to the poor,” calling for an “economic bill of rights” that would “guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work.” In Mr. Beck’s taxonomy, this would make him a Marxist.

Also, some Republicans and Tea Party members blatantly cherry-pick the portions of the U.S. Constitution that reflects their world view. However, despite the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution or even the plain language of some portions within the Constitution, there’s a lot in the Constitution that some Republicans and Tea Party members would like to change. Via the Associated Press:

Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia won his seat in Congress campaigning as a strict defender of the Constitution. He carries a copy in his pocket and is particularly fond of invoking the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

But it turns out there are parts of the document he doesn’t care for — lots of them. He wants to get rid of the language about birthright citizenship, federal income taxes and direct election of senators, among others. He would add plenty of stuff, including explicitly authorizing castration as punishment for child rapists.

This hot-and-cold take on the Constitution is surprisingly common within the GOP, particularly among those like Broun who portray themselves as strict Constitutionalists and who frequently accuse Democrats of twisting the document to serve political aims.

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Sessions, who routinely accuses Democrats of trying to subvert the Constitution and calls for respecting the document’s “plain language,” is taking a different approach with the 14th Amendment. “I’m not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind,” he said, “but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen.”

Other widely supported Republican amendments would prohibit government ownership of private companies, bar same-sex marriage, require a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes, and — an old favorite — prohibit desecration of the American flag.

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Holding up the 2nd Amendment as sacrosanct, for example, while dismissing other parts of the Constitution is “cherry picking,” said Kende, director of Drake University’s Constitutional Law Center.

Virginia Sloan, an attorney who directs the nonpartisan Constitution Project, agreed.

“There are a lot of people who obviously don’t like income taxes. That’s a political position,” she said of criticism of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the modern federal income tax more than a century ago. “But it’s in the Constitution … and I don’t think you can go around saying something is unconstitutional just because you don’t like it.”

Sloan said that while some proposals to alter the Constitution have merit, most are little more than posturing by politicians trying to connect with voters.

“People are responding to the politics of the day, and that’s not what the framers intended,” she said. “They intended exactly the opposite — that the Constitution not be used as a political tool.”

The good news, Sloan and Kende said, is that such proposals rarely go anywhere.